PHILADELPHIA - To those Twitterverts who have likened the Eagles to a sinking ship, give yourselves a hardy salute. Such a characterization, while obviously cliched, is no less accurate. Day by day, the crew based at One Novacare Way seems determined to stick to a stinking, sinking season script.

The latest sign of an organizational capsizing came Monday, as coaching captain Andy Reid dismissed another of his defensive crew, this time line coach Jim Washburn, known to some people in the practice complex as a combative sort.

That’s coachspeak for jerk.

Regardless of personality, however, Washburn is respected in coaching circles, and didn’t become clueless overnight. Yet Reid, who refuses to acknowledge his days as a coach in Philadelphia have also jumped the shark - or did so years ago - thought it best to cut ties with Washburn after a 38-33 loss to the Cowboys Sunday night that not only was ugly, but in keeping with the MO established several weeks ago.

An Eagles team rendered defenseless, not by injury so much as by an onset of veteran dissent.

Advertisement

Extreme displays of lazy and directionless play.

Apparent siphoning of individual confidence.

All that and a lot of dumbness, too.

While so many veterans not playing to their capabilities should play the share-the-blame game, the level of it here is so extreme that it looks like an all-out mutiny.

Reid of course, won’t go there when it comes to reported discord within his ranks. Not among veteran players embarrassing themselves on the field, and certainly not the obvious fractures on his staff of coaches.

But his actions are speaking for him, whether he wants them to or not.

“It was just something that I had been pondering and working through,” Reid said of the Washburn burning. “I just thought it was the right time now,”

Reid wants Brasher to form a working relationship with younger players like Brandon Graham and Fletcher Cox.

“Having Tommy Brasher back here again brings back a very loyal, loyal assistant,” Reid said. “(He is) a coach that I’ve had here for a number of years who understands exactly what I’m about and what I’m trying to get done with a young defensive line.”

That Brasher is 71 and has been retired for a while? Well, apparently that should have no effect on his ability to establish a rapport with younger players.

So eight straight games and two defensive coaches (coordinator Juan Castillo, said to have problems working with Washburn, being the other) have been lost, but one point has been gained:

True to his especially “combative” spirit, Andy Reid thinks it important to see himself as the last to go down.

He soldiers on despite everybody - presumably including relatively silent owner Jeffrey Lurie - thinking his fate has long been sealed, and one last grumpy sign-off tentatively scheduled for four weeks from now.

At that time, it won’t matter what kind of sassy sweetheart Washburn was, or what kind of kindly, uncoordinated mistake Castillo was, or how many times Brasher has been hired by the Eagles as a defensive line coach (this is the third stint here for the grayster in a 200-year coaching career).

It will soon be all over anyway.

Reid’s program and all its people will be desconstructed in one swell swipe by Lurie. All these coaching characters will be gone. Or is that just another presumption?

“We haven’t even gone there,” Reid said after being asked for the hundredth time about his job security. “I’m sure we’ll talk about it at some time, but that’s not where we’re at right now. We’re trying to win football games.”

Trying to win now. So that’s why Reid decided it was better to tell a Mike Vick who is wrapping up his recovery from a concussion and is pushing to get back into action to take a nice comfy seat?

Fresh off being assured several times by Reid and other organizational psychologists that all this talk of him losing his position because of this injury was hogwash ... Vick has just lost his position because of this injury.

Not exactly the way a $100,000,000 patient should be treated.

“He was very positive about it,” Reid actually said about Vick’s reaction to the news. “Completely understood and was on board.”

Sure he was. Just long enough to be thrown overboard by Andy Reid, his captain’s bars just as intact as his will to be the last man standing.